Facebook just launched its long-awaited question and answer product dubbed Facebook Answers. You can now ask your social network any question you feel like and get answers from your extended network. This – by the way – includes friends of friends as well, so your questions will actually reach an exponentially larger audience than just your closest friends. At the same time, you can also go to the new “Questions” section in Facebook and see questions that your friends and friends of friends asked. You can also ask questions about your friends directly from their profiles – which looks just like a regular wall posting.

Thanks to its tagging feature, you can ensure that the right people will see your questions.

With Ask.com, Quora, Google’s recent acquisition Aardvark and a few other startups, the Q&A market is getting very crowded now. Facebook, with its 500 million users is likely to crush all of these services, though more SEO oriented Q&A platforms like Yahoo Answers may not suffer the same effects as the more socially oriented products like Aardvark (assuming Google does anything with it) or Quora.

Chances are, though, that if users will find Facebook Answers to be a satisfactory solution (to a problem most probably never considered in the first place), they won’t go out to explore these other products.

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Frederic Lardinois founded SiliconFilter in 2011. Before starting this site, he wrote about 1,500 articles for ReadWriteWeb. His areas of interest are consumer web and mobile apps, as well as Internet-connected devices like cars, smart sensors and toasters.
You can reach him at [email protected]